UNTITLED

Julius Shulman’s architectural photographs seem to be everywhere. They play a key role in “Birth of the Cool” at the Orange County Museum of Art. They’re also the subject of solo exhibitions at Santa Monica’s Craig Krull Gallery and L.A. Central Library’s Getty Gallery.

Shulman, who’s best known for his shot of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study #22, used actors in his photos to evoke a lifestyle rather than merely a building. “I used people from the beginning,” Shulman says. “Even though people like [Richard] Neutra didn’t like me to. For me, the purpose of a photograph is to illustrate the function of the architecture, and adding people was a way to emphasize that.”

Many architects have tried to re-create his photos in their own projects. L.A.-based Hagy Belzberg recently built a house on Skyline Drive in Laurel Canyon that comes close to capturing Shulman’s famous shot. “We weren’t necessarily interested in referencing Koenig’s architecture,” Belzberg says. “But . . . we were interested in capturing the feeling of that image.”

It would be easy to say that Shulman’s images place a building’s value not on function or form, but in how well it translates to the media. Yet one could also argue that the same imagism drives many of today’s top architects. And that’s music to the ears of the 97-year-old Shulman: “I want younger architects to understand that image is very, very important to their careers.”

theguide@latimes.com